Psychohistorical Crisis

9

TWO MEN FIND EACH OTHER, 14,790 GE

When atomic power was discovered by our feral ancestors seventy-four millennia ago, the apparatus was simple enough—but both monstrous and dangerous. The fires were blocks of carbon alternated with uranium slugs, piping, and control rods. Naturally unstable isotopes were extracted as bomb ingredients. The first crude city-destroyers were carted to their targets by twelve men in huge aluminum flying fortresses powered by air-breathing engines. There are hints in the record that a whole continent was once made radioactive by the failure of a fission power generator...At the time of the original sublight starships, when isolated stellar cultures diverged over ten millennia for lack of power to maintain communications... a slow process of evolution was perfecting a mass-to-energy technology that could deliver both a high-energy density and a vanishing gamma emission rate... ushering in the era of expansion based on Eta Cuminga’s hyperspace technology...After forty-eight millennia of inefficient double-pole hyperdrive design, the engineers of Splendid Wisdom began building the first massive Oerstan hyperdrive motors that tapped into the parallel energy of the... probably the major factor giving Splendid Wisdom’s navy an... At the other end of the scale, during the decline of Imperial... the magicians of Faraway mastered the process of local phased charge-flipping, using these hydrogen-fueled microannihilation devices to...

—From the Interregnum Exhibit at the Bureau of

Historical Sciences

Kargil Linmax was a big-boned man who hefted Kikaju

Jama’s galactarium in a six-fingered hand while he gave it a

quick eyeball scrutiny in the doorway of his spacious workshop. “Looks like a gaudy fake to me!” he roared in the general direction of the Hyperlord with a voice that might have been calling up all five-fingered hands on a warship.

Jama moved his ears back a head-width. “I know an ancestral Faraway Trader who would be miffed at your lack of faith in his judgment ,” he said in defense of his property, slightly miffed himself. “I myself watched it project stars. I can guarantee that it was once owned by a Trader. The friend who procured it for me is very reliable.”

“And it kifizzled right after you bought it? The best fakes do that. They kifizzle before you find out that they can’t really do what they are supposed to do.” He flipped his bug-eyed power-spectacles down over his nose and stared. “It doesn’t look like any Faraway design I’ve ever seen, not remotely. Pretty little tiling, though. Who knows? It’s possible that it’s authentic. By the fourth century”—he was implying Founder’s Era, not Galactic Era—“there were some very rich traders and they contracted some of the damnedest of intricate art pieces. I’ve seen stranger. The artist wouldn’t have been local to the Periphery, though. That’s not a count against it. The oddest people hypered out of nowhere down onto the shores of Faraway in that era. Let’s bounce your toy off the deck.”

At the shocked look on Kikaju’s face, Kargil’s laughter boomed. “Just an expression. At the scholarium I was trained as a nanomechanic. We learned a very gentle touch, which I’m afraid we’ve always called ‘bouncing’—in case you once again hear those dreaded words from my mouth.” “You are by profession a nanomechanic?” The Hyperlord was impressed and unconsciously took his mopcap in hand, looking for a rack upon which to hang it.

“The scholarium was eons ago; I never practiced. The navy took my contract and I spent my working life uselessly involved in the maintenance and perfection of secret naval ultrawave combat protocols. Faraway antiques are just a hobby of mine to keep me out of trouble in my old age. I’ve a nice shop, mostly naval surplus that I kidnapped from storage graveyards.”

“An impressive set of equipment,” the Hyperlord commented wryly as he stepped into the warehouse-spacious workshop. Some of the resident machines were so small that they hid themselves inside their own armored cleanboxes and could be visited only by electronic microscope. Some were mobile roboassistants of alien design and mobility. Some of the machines were enormous. “It looks like you raided a hidden First Empire cache.”

Linmax laughed. “The fill-your-eyes bulk is mostly cut-rate earthquake mountings—an exchange of mass for finesse. You noticed on your way from the station, down those cockamamie stairs, that I live inside a canyon face and am staring into the homes of my neighbors across fifty meters of natural air shaft. A hundred years ago a fault line slipped right beneath your feet. Glad I wasn’t bom then.” He grinned. “The sheared apartments were scrapped rather than rebuilt. Left a gap that makes for friendly yodeling contests. We still get our teeth rattled sporadically—nothing serious, mind you, but I take my little precautions.”

“Great stars!” exclaimed an appalled Jama, fidgeting with the velvet scales of his cap. “Why would anyone live here!”

“Cheap rent.” The big man grinned again and ran his six-fingered hand through white hair. “You don’t think the pension of a retired naval officer is enough to keep a man alive, do you?”

He had extracted the dead atomo-unit from the galactar-ium ovoid and was clamping the tiny power supply inside a cleanbox for analysis. “And what is your interest in Faraway antiques?” But before Jama could reply, Kargil Linmax grimaced. “Bad news and good news. The atomo is a Farliquar, compact shape but shoddy design. A very small outfit that was in production less than three years before it failed: 374 to 377 FE. They made exorbitant promises and couldn’t deliver. Some good stuff, but poor quality control. Screwed up on their war contracts. First Farliquar I’ve ever seen. So it’s authentic—but you won’t find a replacement.” He read more numbers off his instruments. “Looks like an intermittent failure—the worst kind.

Maybe jiggling it or banging it against your head would make it work. Except the repair might not last more than a few jiffs. Might melt your doodad. I wouldn’t bet that your piece isn’t a cheap knockoff cobbled out of war surplus and sold to a gullible Trader by some non-Faraway shyster. Where did your reliable friend find it—in some Trader’s buried discard heap?”

“Then it’s junk?” queried a stricken Hyperlord.

“Means nothing. The atomo might have been used because all the good ones were being sucked up by the war effort. But don’t get your hopes up.”

“I should tell you that it’s been in space for a couple of millennia.”

“Salvage? That could be good or bad. I’ll look for cosmic ray damage. The really bad news is that I don’t have any mating atomos in stock—and neither will anyone else. If you can spare the credit, I’ll build you some. An octad is as cheap as one. The worst that can happen is that we blow up the workshop.” He demonstrated with a wide fling of his hands. “When the zoning flunkies come after us, we’ll blame it on the fault line. Us local types have learned how to blame everything on the quakes.”

Jama had not found a place to hang his hat so he readjusted it to his head. Anxiously he watched a cheerful Kargil open up a larger cleanbox and insert the powerless jade artifact into its vicious-looking interior.

“We leave it there. I’m doing an outrageously slow analysis, but that way I get to use very soft fingers.” He made some adjustments. “We now have time on our hands. We can chat on my balcony and yodel.”

From across the shop floor, they were approached by a six-year-old girl with a breadroll stuffed with slaw and cheese, her attention on the wavering surface that brimmed atop the glass of juice she was bringing to Kargil. “Papa, you have to eat!” She turned to Jama. “And what would you like, sir?” The “sir” was added because of the elaborately important way their visitor was dressed.

“He starves, Sweet Toes,” said Kargil, already munching on his roll. “If I can turn him into a paying customer, we’ll keep him for dinner.”

She saluted crisply and ran off. The military salute so startled the Hyperlord that he just stared at her retreating figure.

“Well, after all,” explained Linmax gruffly, “I’m her commanding officer.”

“You’re her grandfather?”

“Space, no!”

Metal clanged under two pairs of feet. Jama turned and glanced back in the direction of the ruckus and saw a five-year-old boy being chased by a loudly protesting two-year-old along a second-floor gallery at the front of the workshop. A family! “My apologies.” The Hyperlord bowed as he tried diplomacy to correct his gaff. “You must be the father of these youths, of course!”

“Not likely! The father of Sweet Toes,” said Linmax sternly, “murdered her mother and then jumped to his death while trying to take with him both his daughter and the railing she was clenching for dear life. I happened to be there when she most needed kind attention—I know how to unweld fingers from metal. A home for her came as a bonus. No use burdening the social services with the shards of such a case. They are efficient but lack... well, you know what I mean.” He sighed before continuing with his story.

“One unwise decision, of course, leads to another,” he lamented. “The baby you saw chasing the boy was brought to me by a distraught neighbor—who labors under the misapprehension that I have a kind heart. I’ve been running an informal local government to handle events beyond the capacity of the bureaucracy. Baby Girl—we’ll have to give her a name—was evidently abandoned. She has no birth certificate, at least her gene class doesn’t match any of the trillion on planetary file. And she’s no immigrant because she has no nanocertification stamp in her cells to tell us that she’s been declared free of the horrors that plague our Galaxy. I checked that myself. About the boy, don’t ask.”

They were out on the balcony now, airseals hissing behind them, standing over a jumble of other balconies and unplanned stairs and arching breezeways that went up and up and down and down—and down. Carefully, very carefully, Hyperlord Kikaju Jama reached out and clenched the plasteel railing for dear life while settling himself into a plastic chair. He was pleased that it wasn’t an aerochair. There was no doubt in Jama’s mind that he was one of these Splendid Cowards who grew green around the gills when he saw something farther below him than the bottom of his feet. Kargil already had his shoes up on the railing while he waved at a neighbor who was beating the dust from her rug into public air. Amazingly antisocial! Such anarchy thrilled the Hyperlord. People like that could be led into revolution!

Kargil Linmax turned affably to his customer. “You were telling me about this interest of yours in Faraway antiques before I so rudely interrupted you.”

“The artistic achievements of the anarchic governments of our last Dark Age fascinate me.”

The old naval officer guffawed. “Governments? Dandies like you were out there during the Interregnum hacking up the planets for firewood because there were no governments.” “That is an unnecessarily extreme statement. There were many experiments in government at the time, many more than in today’s lethargic Galaxy. I was thinking of the interesting experiment in self-rule that the scientists of Faraway set up when they were exiled to the Periphery.”

“With all due respect, your Hyperlord, that was hardly an experiment. Democracy is as old as Rith of Sol, if we can believe mythology. It was invented by simian slave-holding homosexual misogynists who lived with their irascible gods up on Mount Olympus or Mount Vernon or someplace like that.”

“My dear man, I believe your mythology is incorrect. Democracy was invented by the slave Lincoln who led a great revolt against his Virginian masters, forcing them to come down from Mount Ararat to grant his people the Magna Charta. There is good reason to believe that this Lincoln was a real man and not some archetypical construct, though I’ve never researched the matter. It is not even certain that he was from Rith, according to several very trustworthy accounts.”

The door hissed, and the sad face of Sweet Toes protruded, allowing public and private air to mix. “We can’t get Baby Girl to take her nap! She’s dancing!”

“Well, now. Insubordination among the crew. It will have to be dealt with. Have you tried faster music?”

“Papa! Be serious! We’re desperate. Come help us,” she implored.

“Nope. A good ship runs itself. When I was captain, and a petty officer couldn’t get his charges to nap, I shipped him back to base without his pension. A captain’s only duty is to point the ship. That hardly includes supervising naps.”

“I could hold her head under a pillow!” sulked Sweet Toes. “... a violation of Regulation 43A!”

“Oh, Papa!” She saluted and whacked the door shut with a hiss.

Jama harumphed. “I see that you are not a great believer in the achievements of your simian mountain-dwelling homosexual misogynists!”

“Everything in its place. One can’t expect the famless ancients to have solved all the problems of the Galaxy. I suspect that they did very poorly when faced with naptime for a two-year-old—my study of military history indicates our planetbound ancestors, of every political persuasion, excelled in the art of massacring helpless children.”

“Mere time-honored slander. My opinion is that much useful wisdom has been lost over the ages.”

“Are you a Cryogenist?”

The Hyperlord scanned his famlist of cults and found nothing. “The name doesn’t register.”

“Cryogenists search the Galaxy for the icy corpse of an epic Rithian—I believe helium was first liquefied in the sixtieth millennium, pre-imperial or thereabouts, and used primarily to cool the coffins of sycophants; thawed, this primitive is to reveal to us the Lost Wisdom of the Ages, and, with his great perspective on time and his profound personal knowledge, is to save us from all our troubles. There is a great literature built around such revivals.” Kargil was smiling with genuine amusement while imagining this messianic Rithian in bearskin desperately searching the corridors of Splendid Wisdom for a tree upon which to piss. “I was actually approached in my naval capacity in the hopes that I might keep a lookout for our suspended savior. The cultists lased me a file which purported to have traced our ancestor’s shipping documents, bluntly pinpointing his location to within a thousand leagues of the position of my ship.” Hyperlord Kikaju Jama made a growling noise of disgust in his throat. “You’d think in these scientific times that such balderdash would long have been laid to rest!”

Kargil Linmax offered a morose reply. “It is the fault of the Pscholars that such nonsense persists, damn them.” The curse was followed by a throaty grumble.

Such an unexpected but welcome expression of heresy left Jama bolt upright in his seat, thus having to stare in fear down into the tenanted canyon below. He forced himself to relax, firmly planting his spinal cord against the back wall of their tiny balcony. “How so?” His eyes now watched every nuance of Kargil’s face, careful not to look away. In the political current of the Second Empire, one dared not step too readily into an undertow of discontent.

“The Pscholars keep secrets.” The old face showed lines of distaste and annoyance more than those of anger. “Their power to create order rests in the secrecy of their psychohistoric methods. They predict and guide. We mere mortals must never be allowed to know enough to contradict them lest we bring on consequences beyond our ken—but not theirs. The hoary myth of the woman and the apple tree— knowledge is dangerous, ignorance is bliss. By example the Pscholars teach us that secrecy is power. We must remain in our orderly garden, they instruct us, to forgo the larger dangers of knowledge. They cannot teach us that knowledge is power because then they would be obliged to share their knowledge. Is it any wonder that cultists abound who tout the virtues of hidden powers?”

“You speak boldly of your concerns!”

“I make no secret of the fact that 1 have no power”

A man with long sleeves—one red, the other green— hailed from a distant balcony, finally yodeling a call which Jama could not understand. Kargil yodeled back, then turned to his guest to translate. “You probably don’t understand our yodeling codes. I’ve invited him to drop down to my place for a visit. Town business. I think I told you that I’m the mayor of an informal group of locals who bypass our authorities when they procrastinate.”

They stood up, Jama close to the wall, his fingers discreetly clinging to the building stone, appalled to note, high above their tenanted canyon, a brightly colored balloon-man puttering past, perhaps having dropped from one of the canyon roof’s underslung cupolas. He, too, yodeled at Kargil but was too far away to be recognized. Jama’s host seemed to know everyone in this microcosm of Splendid Wisdom. As they retreated indoors, Kikaju was deciding that he had to recruit this man into his burgeoning conspiracy. Kargil’s confidence was beginning to impress him.

Later an affable Kargil admitted the four “townsmen” when they arrived in his entranceway, one of them the man with red and green sleeves. Jama watched intently. The old naval captain didn’t offer seats but listened to his friends, interrupting only to sharpen the discussion. None of it was of interest to Jama—it was about local issues unfamiliar to him and about local people, among billions, unlikely to touch his life again—but Jama remained fascinated by the skill with which this man handled other men. Kargil was obviously pushing for decisions. He got three commitments in efficient succession—and a clear statement of an agenda item for the next meeting: ways to supplement weakening government financing for the rebuilding of a condemned sports stadium. With business complete, Kargil sent his visitors home on the excuse that he had an analysis in progress.

He turned to Jama with a gleam of expectation. “And I do have an analysis in progress. By now we must have collected all we presently need to know about your contraption. Come. The moment of truth.” Without opening the cleanbox containing the ovoid, he fed the data from it directly into his fam. He stood in inner contemplation, staring off into space for a few moments that caused Jama suspense, then nodded and, as almost an afterthought, transferred some of the data to a flatplate in order to show the Hyperlord the essentials of his conclusion.

“Your object is surely authentic.” He pointed at clumps in the hazy image on the flatplate. “I’m surprised. The tiny clusters surrounding those macroblobs are nanocomputers in a cross-redundant configuration. It’s a Faraway design pioneered in the third century and widely used during the fourth. Eccentric. But it’s a configuration that would strongly protect you against data loss.” He fingered in an amplification. “See that starlike imperfection? A rather violent cosmic ray hit. Not a problem. And I must recant on the Farliquar. It seems to have done yeoman’s service when briefly powered up from time to time to repair cosmic ray hits—there is no evidence of damage prior to three hundred years ago. So the atomo has been operational until recently. Astonishing. I can’t be sure, but your innards seem to have survived. Now all we need is a fresh atomo-unit.” He paused, looking at Kikaju Jama—undoubtedly speculating about an unemployed Hyperlord’s financial resources.

“The price?” asked the Hyperlord stoically.

Dispassionately Linmax quoted a substantial sum. “Can’t do it for less.”

Jama flinched. More comers to shave. Maybe he could start by canceling his accommodations and arranging to sleep in the workshop. “It’s a deal. Half now and half after the atomo has been installed?”

“It’s a deal. The deal is that I get paid for the eight atomos, not for the repair of your gizmo if it isn’t functional. The risk isn’t great. My best guess is that the galactarium itself is in functioning order.”

“A risk—but I’ll take it.” Right then and there they made the financial transaction.

“You’ll have dinner with us then, of course,” Kaigil said wryly. “But first I can do a work-around to alleviate some of your uncertainty. You seem about to shit an uncomfortable cannonball. Your device, I surmise, is missing only a power source. I can jury-rig that—it’s going to need about forty different voltages and a snake-pit of wires—that will allow us to conduct a test. It’s not going to be portable without an atomo, you understand.”

While Kargil worked, Jama waited anxiously, seated on a pile of old Faraway metal-forming tools, famfeeding himself the contents of catalog slabs and whatever else came to hand. He was an obsessive reader who read anything to keep his mind occupied when he was edgy. Finally the old man began to move back and forth between the main workshop and a side room from which he emerged after an interminable hiatus with a smile on his face. He held up his strange six-fingered hand in the full victory sweep. “It responds to finger pressure points, standard Faraway coding. I’ve been playing with it. With only five of my fingers, of course.” He grinned.

“Without me there?”

Before Jama could further express his anxiety, Kargil ushered him into the side room where unnatural wires snaked from the ovoid’s innards. He sealed the entrance. When he caressed the ovoid, the room magically darkened, replacing the shelves and wall screens and clutter—the floor, everything—with an ebony pantheon of stars that almost sent Jama clutching for spacesuit controls he was not wearing. It took moments to notice that the jury-rigged wiring left swaths of unnatural shadows across the virtual sky.

“The galactarium is in working order!” Jama exclaimed with visible relief.

“Maybe. It’s a strange device. Being a navy man, I’m familiar with navigational history, but this thing is far more an artifact of superstition than it is of navigation.” Deft squeezings on the ovoid superimposed a coordinate system over the celestial sphere. “You’d never see anything like it on a real ship. The equator is divided into twenty-four sections. From equator to poles it is ninety ‘degrees,’ plus or minus, with sixty-‘minute’ and sixty-‘second’ and then decimal subdivisions. Interstellar length is measured in parsecs, a nonstandard unit which requires an arcane knowledge of the distance between Old Rith and Sol—which, if you knew, you wouldn’t know how to apply to arc-seconds because you’d have to throw in the pi number.

“It all smacks of the kind of superstition one finds in a typical wisdom-of-the-ancients tract—certainly one trying to prove that the true lore comes down to us directly from Old Rith or Alphacen or wherever. Galaxy knows, there are enough of such cults. Parsecs went out of use seventy thousand years ago and date back to the dawn of counting but are periodically revived by new gospels looking for primordial authority. Certainly we aren't dealing with an ancient device; it couldn’t have been built prior to the Interregnum, and the finger coding is also a standard of fairly recent origin. Neither are we dealing with the usual navigational aid. The thing would have driven a real navigator crazy. Look at this.”

The captain pressed more sequences and the sphere of stars all around them was rapidly fragmented into constellations annotated with a weird symbolism that Jama had never seen before. “No matter what coordinate point you key in as the origin,” Kargil continued, “it can create baroquely artistic constellations. Useless flummery—but pretty.” Gracefully he pushed aside wires to show off the sky to better advantage. “The constellations don’t relate to the sky of Faraway but do seem to be associated with some kind of pentagonal mystery. Do you know any pentagonal systems philosophically inclined toward superstition?” The old navy captain obviously knew too many.

“Our Galaxy is a big place,” Jama repeated, using the oldest of worn cliches.

“You might check out inhabited pentagonal systems if you are really interested in the origins of the device. In any case you should make special note of its symbols. I recognize most of them. They date back to the first star-maps. All the symbols for the seven sacred planets are there though they seem to be employed in a different context. Every planet that claims to be the home of mankind has a theory to explain those seven symbols. The other symbols—I’ve counted forty-two of them—seem to be derived from the symbols that archaeohistorians believe were devised for the first interstellar planets discovered during the first millennium of the dispersion—before such coy nonsense became impractical. And look what I can project with this button configuration.” The sky was invaded by a mathematical design that collected the stars into a jewel-faceted setting. “For that chart, you need coordinates, a zenith, and a date. Your device is an astrological chart-maker based on a catalog of the ten billion stars most important to the Traders of Faraway. Space only knows how a man would read such a mishmash of lines and arcs! Why a pragmatic Faraway trader would have had it built eludes me.”

The Hyperlord was himself in a pragmatic mood as he gazed at the galactarium’s display. “Probably it was a gift to the Trader’s unpragmatic mistress. Omnipotent God has never been able to lay out the bounds of female belief! But”—he shrugged—“let us never mind the artistic license the gizmo takes with astronomy; are the stars it projects just pretty points, or can they be identified?” He was wondering if they came from a reliable database like those kept by the First Empire’s fanatically accurate Interstellar Spatio-analysis Bureau.

“Spectrograph, star motion, multiple star orbits, main planetary motions, survey data of the I.S.B.—all there.”

“Names? Or does it use the damn spectrograph for a name? Or some damn cultish naming convention we never heard of?”

Kargil fiddled with his fingers. “I.S.B. codes. Ah. Names—when the star_has one—and First Empire alpha-numerical classification.”

“Do the names use the Imperial alphabet?” queried Jama.

“The standardized Imperial alphabet was more than ten millennia old when this device was built.”

“Try Zural—use the spelling: Z-U-R-N-L .”

The starfield shifted, the constellations were re-formed, symbols winked in and out. Kargil displaced more wires. “Got it. Zural. Single star, cool, aging, three planets, one a giant, the current position is twenty-three of the device’s damn parsecs from Faraway. That would be about seventy leagues. No mention of a colony.”

“Bull’s-eye!” Hyperlord Kikaju Jama jumped about with his lace cuffs flapping. “Another dark secret of the Pscholars revealed!” He danced in dervish circles with virtual stars all around him. Kargil waited patiently for an explanation.

“Zural isn’t on the standard star charts of the Second Empire.”